Get America Out of Afghanistan

"Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that willl never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made. As such, I submit my resignation."

This past September 19, Matthew P. Hoh, a U.S. Marine officer and DoD Senior Civilian Representative for Zabul Province in Afghanistan, submitted his resignation from his post in a four-page letter damning the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. If you haven't yet read it, you should so click here .

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan."

Unfortunately and as usual, there is far more to our "presence" than the "why are we there?" question.

In late October, The New York Times reported that the CIA has been making payments for years to a suspected major figure in the Afghan opium trade, the brother of the Afghan President Karzai, who apparently collects huge fees for allowing opium-filled trucks to cross bridges that he controls. Poppy fields in the south and west of the country reportedly produce the raw material for an estimated 80% or more of the world's heroin consumption. The Taliban, who outlawed poppy production during their reign, now relies on the trade to support its operations against U.S. and NATO forces.

Meanwhile, the ethnic-majority yet highly fragmented Pashtun insurgency against the U.S. occupation and installed government is made up of multiple groups of peoples who have always fought against foreign occupation of their lands, as they have done for centuries going back at least 2300 years to Alexander The Great and as recently as their driving out the Soviet army, with U.S. support, a few decades ago.

Now the U.S. is the occupying nation while aligned with an installed, non-representative government whose army and police are comprised of mostly non-Pashtuns. Further, besides the President's brother, Hoh states that Karzai's "confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts."

Meanwhile, as the DEA increases the agency's presence in Afghanistan, the suspicion grows of CIA involvement in the Afghan opium trade, which is currently feeding a new heroin epidemic not only in the U.S. but in Western Europe as well. History from just the last four decades knows that this wouldn't be a first.

Then there's the recent Presidential election, in which the U.S. is accused of sponsoring election fraud, where according to the New York Times article, Karzai's brother was a key player in producing thousands of fraudelent ballots for his brother's re-election.

From "America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA" by Dave Lindorff; "In a country where finding printing presses is sure to be difficult, and where transporting bales of counterfeit ballots is risky, you have to wonder whether an agency like the CIA, which has ready access to printers and to helicopters, might have had a hand in keeping its assets in control in Kabul."

"The real story here is that where the US goes, the drug trade soon follows, and the leading role in developing and nurturing that trade appears to be played by the Central Intelligence Agency."

The Times article exposing the CIA link to a drug-kingpin, brother of a known corrupt, U.S.-sponsored President should be it, the last straw for the American public. Kudos to The New York Times for bringing this crazy shit to the usually censored mainstream media and to Matthew Hoh as well, who surely sacrificed his career to do what he believed was necessary. A majority of Americans are opposed to these illegal, neo-conservative wars. Now is beyond the time for the organization of massive demonstrations on Washington.

President Obama isn't being forceful and appears to be trying hard to not have to make the call against escalation of forces. For what and to what end? The President and Congress don't pull America's strings anyway. With everything that we now know and even suspect, it's time to get America out of Afghanistan and reign in the elite internationalists', war-thirsty control over U.S. foreign policy via massive public pressure.

Harvest Fest Night and Youth Soccer

On Friday, Oct. 16, Grace Christian Academy hosted their annual fundraising dinner, this year entitled "Harvest Fest Night." Richard's kindergarden class performed a song and dance bit. Richie's the fried egg in the middle while his best bud, Paul Lister is the salt to the right. It was a fun evening with a number of good student performances.

Richard joined soccer league this year for the first time and I, kind of by default, ended up as his coach. We are with the MP United football club, u6 (6 & under) division. This is my squad, along with my assistant coach, Ayuzo Kaga on the left, standing above her two daughters. We have a pretty good squad, 3-1 so far. Richard and the girls are ultra-solid on D, we've given up just three goals in our four games, while the other boys take care of the push to the opponents' goal.

It's a hoot watching the kids play.

Coach Daddy and his protege before our game in San Roque at a really nice elementary school campus sitting right on the lagoon.

Lyssa Rae prefers to do her cheerleading from her favorite rocking squirrel in the park of our home field on Navy Hill.

No jobs = No recovery

This.....is.....awesome!!

"Hell, it takes Eli Manning, quarterback of the New York f...ing Giants six years to make a hundred million dollars!"

As the editor of the MonkeyBusinessBlog, where I linked this video from, said "get a bat and turn the music up. Then cut up your credit cards and send them back to where they came with a big GFY message. Pull your money out of the big boys' banks and put it in the local community bank...if you can find one."

This guy is off the hook, a should-be blue-collar hero with a rallying cry for anyone who's been deeply burned by the Great Financial Meltdown. A long clip but well worth it however he drops lots of F-bombs so be forewarned.

"And PLEASE people, lets not forget his batting skills! He's swinging from both sides of the plate and he's crushing EVERYTHING!"

What's It Gonna Take?

I acknowledge that I've been pretty obsessed over the last year or so with ranting about the dismal state of our plutocratic, American political scene, particularly the plundering of the national treasury. I realize that I'm just one of millions of Americans with an opinion and that my view, armed with the internet and a 19" TV, coming from a small island lifestyle half-way around the world from the U.S. mainland is about as welcome as a stink-bomb in a stairwell.

But there are things happening right now that are unprecedented in our lifetimes, if not in our nation's history. I still can't comprehend fellow citizens' validation of these events and I'm blown away that there aren't mass demonstrations in the streets. Folks just kind of seem OK with it all. In fact, those that are getting rebellious are not demanding change but are lashing out against it.

The Federal Reserve, which is really a cartel of the largest banks with a free pass to print money, has handed out via the U.S. Treasury over $13 trillion dollars in cash and guarantees, no strings attached, to its members on crap debt from what should-be fraudulent business practices. They don't have to answer to Congress or the President, they made their large campaign contributions, and feel no obligation to disclose what banks have gotten how much or if there is even a required pay back. These banks promoted should-be fraudulent products, kept layering the investments on top of the same assets in classic Ponzi-scheme fashion, then were the largest hedgers against the products that they were selling, made billions in profits and bonuses for their execs then demanded unnecessary "bailouts" at tax payer expense after the floor fell out from their casino, all the while no past or present executives are even being held responsible, let alone prosecuted for fraud. So how does the banking sector thank the tax payers who get to fit the bill for this recussitation? Oh you know, continued foreclosures, credit card rate and late-penalty hikes and of course continued multi-million dollar executive bonuses.

Where is the mass, public anger over this?

Where is the anger over the fact that the U.S. spends more money on military expenditures then the entire rest of the world combined? A large majority of U.S. citizens seem to be against the current "wars" yet our leaders keep piling it on. Despite the country being broke and completely in hawk to China and the rest of the modern world, why do most Americans just grin and accept that America is spending trillions of dollars while putting our young men at risk by chasing tribesmen around some of the world's most desolate areas? Will this prevent a small group of foreign "exchange students" from successfully staging another terrorist act within our borders? I don't agree that it will, do you? Why are so many Americans showing far more uproar over domestic spending programs than they are over our ridiculously expensive, foreign soil-based military complex and imperialistic ways?

Why aren't the jobless protesting by the hundreds of thousands after blue-collar manufacturers have watched their jobs systemically shipped overseas? Why aren't the hundreds of thousands of homeowners who are being foreclosed on fighting for a bailout like the bankers received? $13 trillion to the banks. That could have paid every homeowner's delinquent payments due and kept the banks' books straight but evidently that was never the goal of the Great Wall Street Ripoff. Doesn't this just sort of, kind of bum anybody out?

Why aren't the "Gobama" people going f...ing crazy right now after the democrats and new president have shamelessly backed out of just about every campaign promise that they made to voters who helped put them in office with a mandate while blasting the repugs out of power in the last two elections? Remember "change you can believe in?" How does the old "money speaks louder than words" phrase suit you instead?

The following are excerpts from "Stop Complaining About Right-Wing Protests! The Left Should be (Re)Learning How It's Done," by online writer Dave Lindorff. He reminds us about our not-so-distant ancestors;

"Back in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement wasn't polite and domesticated. It brought activists to events in the Deep South all the way from New York and Boston. Its members rallied in the thousands to shut down segregated public and even private institutions. Its activists occupied buildings on university campuses, boldly confronting police and police dogs and armed men in white robes."

"In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-war protesters in turn shut down recruiting and induction centers, destroyed draft board records, tried to close down Washington, DC, got arrested in the hundreds, incited soldiers to desert and then helped hide them from the law, exposed the 1968 Democratic Convention as a farce, and faced down armed police and soldiers repeatedly, at one point in 1970 closing down the nation's campuses in a national student strike when soldiers shot and killed four unarmed students at Kent State University."

"Years earlier, when workers were being abused, they occupied factories, forcibly shutting them down with sit-down strikes, battled Pinkerton detectives and armed National Guard forces, and set up tent cities in Washington to make themselves heard."

"And they won great victories."

"Where is that passion today? For the most part....environmentalists, labor unions, civil rights advocates, health care reform advocates, anti-war activists--have become neutered office-chair potatoes, sending canned emails to their elected representatives or to the White House."

"We all need to take a lesson from the Right, from those lusty, cantankerous folks who are raising hell at those pathetic town meetings."

"How can it be that 10 percent of American workers don't have a job, and that the government is expecting that number to keep rising for another year or more, or that another 7 percent have either given up even trying to find a job, or have taken part-time work in desperation, and yet we have not had one mass protest in Washington demanding public jobs for the jobless!"

"How can it be that the country has been mired in two wars now for eight years, and we haven't had a million people storming the Pentagon to shut it down (or at least levitate it)!"

"How can it be that we have 49 million Americans who can't even afford to see a doctor when they're sick, and we're talking about a health care "reform" plan that not only won't fix the problem, but will actually end up costing us all $600 billion over 10 years without solving it! And we just write letters to Congress! Why aren't we liberating hospitals and opening them up to the uninsured?"

"Where is the passion and commitment we once had?"

I'm with you Dave. What's it gonna take for Americans to get angry enough to say "enough is enough?"

Kicking Goldman in the Sachs

This video is awesome, Max Keiser at his best on Euro-TV station France 24, slamming Goldman Sachs. “Goldman Sachs are scum.....they are literally stealing a hundred million dollars a day. Goldman Sachs is stealing every day on the floor of the exchange. They should be in the Hague, they should be taken on financial terrorism charges. They should all be thrown in jail”

I'll be shocked if an excerpt of this clip is ever shown on a Stateside network.



You can see the second part of this interview here.

I credit Rolling Stone magazine and gangbuster political critic Matt Taibbi for finally bringing Goldman's fraud and market manipulations to the mainstream media, through Matt's article in the current issue of RS, titled "The Great American Bubble Machine." It's sub-title reads "From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression--and they're about to do it again."

This article in Rolling Stone has apparently created an uproar on Wall Street. Time Magazine put out a kind of half-assed, neutral comment on the article titled "Goldman Sachs vs. Rolling Stone: A Wall Street Smackdown." And in a recent television interview, Eliot Spitzer was asked to comment on the article.

Goldman Sachs operates with impunity to both the rules of Wall Street and the laws of Washington. If you aren't yet completely pissed off over the staggering amount of your tax dollars that have been funneled to Wall Street's "too big to fail" companies, all while they're still passing out billions of dollars in bonuses to themselves, then you need to a) check your pulse for a heartbeat, then b) take one hour of your time to read Matt's article and online follow-ups, linked below, responding to Goldman's non-answers to his questions, as well as their recent cooked-books, earnings release.

July 8, "On The 'Everyone Was Doing It' Excuse"
"..even if it is true that "everyone else was doing it": so what? Who cares? To me this response is highly telling. We published a piece accusing Goldman Sachs of systematically ripping off pensioners and other retail investors by sticking them with rafts of toxic mortgages it knew were losers, of looting taxpayer reserves to cover its bad bets made with AIG, of manipulating gas prices to massive detrimental effect, of helping to explode an internet bubble that caused over $5 trillion in wealth to disappear, and numerous other crimes -- and the response isn't "You're wrong," or "We didn't do that shit, not us," but "Well, Morgan did the same stuff," and "Why aren't you writing about Morgan?"

July 16, "The real price of Goldman's giganto-profits"
"Taken altogether, what all of this means is that Goldman’s profit announcement is a giant 'f..k you' to the rest of the country. It is a statement of supreme privilege, an announcement that it feels no shame in taking subsidies and funneling them directly into their pockets, and moreover feels no fear of any public response. It knows that it’s untouchable and it’s not going to change its behavior for anyone. And it doesn’t matter who knows it."

One giant and very well-connected company bribing their way for the privilege to rig and manipulate supposedly free markets while regulators turn the other way, all at the enormous expense of tax payers is not supposed to be happening in America. Why is there not a major, public uproar over this yet?

Socialism Or Out-of-Control Plutocracy?

"Do it, but be prepped for culture shock. Job market sucks, economy is going down, but housing is cheap if you can get a loan. I think it will be the wild wild west in about 9 more months because your boy Obama is on a mission to destroy the US and bring us to a third world primitive communism state."

This was the e-mail reply that I got from my Saipan roommate from the '90's who now lives in Orange County, CA, when I asked him what he thinks of me moving back to the States sometime in the next year or two. For the record, Obama's not "my boy" nor did I vote in the last Presidential election due to my living overseas.

At happy hour a few weeks back, a discussion that turned political ended similarly when the guy I was talking to snarled that Obama is a socialist and is ruining the country.

This is scary stuff. Why? Because this is just two guys that I know, speaking in the last few weeks. And yet I alone have other friends who tend to have these Fox News views, allowing themselves to be sold on conservative propaganda and forgetting or perhaps ignoring the destruction that bi-partisan, unregulated capitalism over the last few decades had left behind.

I'm afraid that there are millions of clueless sheep that don't understand or accept that both political parties fail to represent us the people, nor do they care about us at all really. Probably 90% of the elected officials are bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists and other special interest groups and we are the laughing stock of the world because we are a nation of ignorant, unenlightened halfwits when it comes to our country's politics and economy. Like I said, I live overseas and when I travel, I have no difficulty meeting people from other countries who are all too eager to strike up conversation and eventually get to something along the lines of "....so what's wrong with Americans anyway?" One common comment that I've gotten a few times is "how could your country elect Bush twice?"

For the majority of Americans who voted for "change" last November, their pick has been a huge disappointment thus far. But if enough Americans truly believe that all of our problems started last November with the election of Barack Obama, then we are really on the road to ruin as the year 2012 could very well bring the likes of Jeb Bush or Newt Gingrich to the Presidency.

Even worse, this misplacement of blame and anger facilitates the kleptocracy among the corporate elite and their elected and appointed enablers that keeps occurring to this day.To believe that "Obama is on a mission to destroy the U.S." is implying that he is actually in charge. Obama is not in charge, he is just a puppet on a string, dancing to the beat as dictated by the corporate donors who got him elected and who really run the country. How else could you explain the fact that financial and insurance industry giants like Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG and Goldman Sachs, despite being directly responsible for flushing the world's financial systems down the toilet, have taken in a combined $13 trillion in hard cash and federal loan guarantees while no one, and that really means nobody, from those firms have been held accountable, let alone charged with crimes, for their highly fraudulent transactions.

How else could you explain away the state of California being allowed to sink into insolvency, their total deficit at about $21 billion, yet Citigroup alone grubbed double that amount in TARP money and another multi-hundred billion more in loan guarantees. The bankers who gambled the economy into a black hole are being lavished with billions while teachers will be fired and social programs exterminated in California. That's plutocracy completely out of control, not socialism or even liberal policy gone wild. We spend more on military expenditures than all countries in the world combined, health care is run by the industry, farmers are beholden to corporate agriculture, the list goes on and on. Obama, like Bush is a corporate puppet carrying water for the same masters.

Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth. The United States is a plutocracy as there most definitely exists a fusion between money and government. I believe that this is a big-picture, bi-product of our two-party political system, more prone to special interest policy influence than a multi-party legislative body, and further aided by the Electoral College system, which doesn't at all allow for a freely-elected President. Critics argue the Electoral College is inherently undemocratic and I agree. Numerous constitutional amendments have been introduced in the Congress seeking a replacement of the Electoral College with a direct popular vote however no proposal has ever passed the Congress. That's not surprising since elected officials shouldn't be counted on to change a policy that would be to their or the ruling class' detriment.

From the "Plutocracy" Wikipedia page: "Plutocracy is a government controlled by a minuscule proportion of extremely wealthy individuals found in most societies. In many forms of government, those in power benefit financially, sometimes enough to belong to the aforementioned wealthy class."
"Classically, a plutocracy was an oligarchy, which is to say a government controlled by the wealthy few. Usually this meant that these ‘plutocrats’ controlled the executive, legislative and judicial aspects of government, the armed forces, and most of the natural resources."
"If there are no forms of control within the society, the plutocracy can easily collapse into a kleptocracy, 'reign of thieves', where the power-holders attempt to confiscate as much public funds as possible as their own private property. A kleptocratic state is usually thoroughly corrupt, has very little production and its economy is unstable. Many failed states represent kleptocracies."

That all sure sounds depressingly familiar doesn't it?

In just the last twenty years we've had a father and son, the Bushes, as well as a husband and nearly a wife tandem, the Clintons, hold the top position, President of the United States! With a current US population of 300+ million citizens, the odds of becoming the President is 10 million to 1 at best. Now just imagine the real odds of a father/son and husband/wife both holding the U.S. Presidency occuring in a true democracy.

Socialism on the other hand, is defined as "a system of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy and a society characterized by equal opportunities for all individuals with a more egalitarian (equal) method of compensation based on the full product of the laborer."

Socialists believe that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small, elite segment of society that controls capital, creates an unequal society and does not provide equal opportunities for everyone in society. That's pretty much happening now so socialist-thinking folks have reason to be upset.

However, socialists advocate the creation of a society in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly and also promotes tax-funded welfare programs and regulation of markets.

So for all of you Fox News-enlightened Obama-bashers, does that really sound like what's going on? Are we moving toward a more equitable distribution of wealth while promoting social welfare and increased regulation of markets? Of course not. In fact, we are going in the complete opposite direction with a continued polarization of wealth, decreased social welfare and a complete lack of Congressional will towards increasing corporate and market regulation.

Don't mistake this current rampage of federal corporate welfare and quasi-ownership as socialism. The government may be taking majority interest in a lot of large, failed companies but they are leaving the same bums in charge who gambled with the economy and lost. They are pushing the risk onto the tax payers while allowing the companies to reap the profits. It's called socializing the risk while privatizing the profits.....or further transferring the country's wealth from the tax payers to the elite and well-connected few.

To my old roomie who believes that we're headed toward a "third-world, primitive communism state", Communism promotes the establishment of a classless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property...."From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The U.S. is hardly moving toward a classless society with common ownership.

Dear family and friends, you've got to get off of the Fox News and other, corporate-censored sources and mouthpieces. They don't offer unbiased reporting and in many cases, they don't offer reality. There are so many websites that offer critical, non-biased accounts of what's really going on in Congress and corporate boardrooms where greed, conflict of interest and total lack of accountability rule. I read Smirkingchimp.com daily while another good site is Truthdig.com. Right-wing, fear mongering, manipulated media have too many Americans blaming the wrong forces that have driven the U.S. economy to the brink of implosion.

Here are some good, recent articles to kick-start your political re-programming;

For my Mom and my Stateside friends still residing in California, read "Stuff the Bankers, Starve the Kids" by Robert Scheer, editor of Truthdig.

"What is $21 billion in federal loan guarantees for California to skirt bankruptcy compared with the $45 billion given to Citigroup, along with $300 billion more in guarantees for that company’s toxic paper? Or how about the $185 billion doled out to AIG? If Citigroup is too big to fail, isn’t the state of California?"

From propping up brutal dictatorships to the illegal occupation of Iraq, foreign policy for nearly a century has been built to benefit global oil companies and indirect control of key oil fields. Read "Chevron, Shell and the True Cost of Oil" by Amy Goodman, the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily, international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 750 stations in North America.

Also, you've got to read "The Great Iraq Swindle: How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury" by Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone.

Are you aware that in the "mortgage meltdown" that's being blamed for last year's loss of your wealth, actual mortgages only make up 2% of the so-called "toxic assets" that the Treasury secretary, through the Federal Reserve, keeps throwing money at, all to the benefit of Citigroup, Sachs, AIG, et al? The same guys who caused this problem. So what are these mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps and other derivatives that these hucksters made billions of dollars in fees on, and that make up the other 98% of our global financial problem? Read Mike Whitney's great article from a few weeks back "Credit Default Swaps: The poisen in the system."

To see how conflict of interest is status-quo in the now-incestual relationship between the financial system and the federal government, read "Our Loss Is BlackRock's Gain", another great article from Robert Scheer at Truthdig.

Though a lot of politicians, corporate directors and lobbyists, a morally-distorted financial system and even millions of Americans who took out mortgages that they couldn't afford, can all be blamed for causing the current financial crisis, one kind of "king dirtball" who should be singled out is former Senator Phil Gramm. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000, Gramm was Congress' most outspoken champion of financial deregulation. He played a leading role in writing and pushing through the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street investment banks. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He was an enabler and protector of Enron and it's executives before that company's collapse and currently is vice-chairman of Swiss bank UBS, which recently under a "deferred prosecution agreement" with the Justice Department, agreed to turn over names of account holders to avoid a criminal indictment for bank-assisted tax fraud.

To read more about this detriment to society, read "Endgame for Phil Gramm?", another good Robert Scheer article, and then check out Time magazine's "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis."

Are you wondering what all this talk is about single payer, universal health care? Read "Rx and the Single Payer" by Bill Moyers, managing editor of "Bill Moyers Journal", which airs Friday nights on PBS. Then read this article that describes how the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who just so happens to have received over $2 million from the health care corporate lobby over the last few years, more money from this lobby than any other Democrat in Congress, won't even put the single-payer option on the table for discussion.

"In the U.S. over 85% of soybeans and 45% of corn are genetically modified and since animal feed comes mainly from these crops, the entire meat production of the nation has been fed on genetically modified animal feed. The arrogance with which multinational biotech corporations such as Monsanto are disrupting and modifying life's genetic order--from seeds to food to animals to the environment--is creepy." This article, "Seeds of Truth" by freelancer Sheila Samples is a must-read and will freak you out if you're unaware of how pervasive genetically modified food is in our food chain....and how it's being forcibly imposed not only on American farmers but globally as well.

It's your duty to yourself to trust not what you're told by the mainstream media but to expand your knowledge of what's really going on by increasing your personal research into and knowledge of our country's economy and politics via broader reading.

2009 Corporate Challenge

On Sunday, May 17 the Saipan Chamber of Commerce hosted their annual Corporate Challenge at Kilili beach park in Susupe. Our company supplied three of the seventeen teams entered, the only company with multiple entries. Events included tug-of-war, a gross-food eating contest, team egg toss and an obstacle course. One of our teams made it to the final of the tug-of-war, which was exciting viewing while Marpac, the Bud distrubutor, was the overall Challenge winner. We didn't crack a top four coconut "trophy" but our staff had a great time and all for a good cause with proceeds benefitting the Chamber scholarship fund.